Hard lessons learned

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
1

So I fired up Campaign and decided to try out my Alliance designs in the normal mode.

Bad choice.

I was all cocky because I’d gotten in the top 100 for each Survival scenario. I thought I was pretty hot stuff in this game. Now I have had an uncomfortable reminder of how much better many of you are. That’s what I get for not continuing with my original plan (try out Cadet level with each race before trying out the next level). Don’t get me wrong! I’ll be back at it, but man I thought I was better than that.

Another interesting lesson has been that my heavily armored EMP missile/Ion Frigates are maybe not so effective against many of you. I had thought they were effectively immune to Frigate weapons, barring the Lucky Shot thing.

So to those who are much better with designs and deployment, congratulations.

You’ll see me again soon enough.

2

Hehehe, I think many of us had similar ‘reminders’ when we booted up the campaign! Goodluck and we’ll see your fleets ingame!

3

I was fortunately spared this happening, by nature of making more fighters than can be killed.
Although i have come across some armor tank fleets that are just NO fun. armor so high my fast swarmers can’t kill it, and unfortunatly they have JUST enough weapons to punch my shields down slowly enough to kill 5-10% of my ships :confused:

That’s one thing i love about GSB, there’s always a stronger fleet against the one you’re using.

4

Isn’t fighter spamming utterly boring? I gave up on playing like that, because it feels like exploiting the system. Cruisers and frigates are far more fun.

5

Utterly and totally dull, beyond belief. that said, as long as it’s still as good as it is now, i’ll use it.

anyone beat my 227 turn recorded time?

6

What difficulty are you guys playing on btw?

7

That was on the medium setting, actually. I REALLY notice a huge difference in play when using a ft swarm

8

I have played a few campaigns on medium setting recently (the holidays have given me a bit of much-needed free time), and a combination of fighters and frigates seems to be most effective. Cruisers are just too vulnerable to a wide variety of weapons to be a good investment, except as fast carriers. In GSB, cruisers are analogous to battleships in WWII, with frigates being the cruiser and destroyer equivalents, and fighters being, well, fighters. And we know how that turned out.

Also, given the anomaly bottlenecks that block fighters and cruisers but never frigates, frigates just make more sense as the workhorses of any offensive strategy.

9

Also. Yesterday, when I noticed the question, my answer was 216 turns. I hadn’t really been focused on speed. After another campaign (on medium setting still), using my combo frigate/fighter strategery, the answer is 174 turns.

10

158 turns.

11

You’re officially ahead of me in speed on Medium :stuck_out_tongue: My fastest was 176 on Admiral

12

Now I guess I’ll have to try the Admiral setting and see how I do.

13

It’s all build up and attack rates, as well as minimal losses.
It’s not HARD to get under 200 turns, just not easy

14

Well, in my first outing I got clobbered early on, but I tried again after a slightly more extended initial buildup and with a slightly heavier reliance on fighters (as opposed to frigates), and finished in 175 turns. Total battles - 90, 3 battles lost, 8 retreats. 2478 ships built, 1491 destroyed. 2460 enemy ships destroyed, 891 captured. Would be interested to hear similar stats from others…you can get a pretty good idea of the shape of a campaign from these numbers, I think.

15

let me see if i can find the endgame file, the numbers from my FT runs look pretty similar to that, only with more retreats (i use scout frigates to keep tabs on enemies.)